I teach a high school programming class part-time, and for an upcoming class project I am considering a pente game. The students already have a GUI framework provided for them that handles images in a grid fairly well (see http://www.horstmann.com/gridworld). In writing their game, I would like to have the students implement a simple AI to play against.

I could brush up on general turn-based strategy algorithms, and then apply them to pente to write the project demo. But frankly, I can only spend so much time on my part-time job, so I don't have the time to try several different approaches before settling on a decent one that isn't too much coding for my students to handle.

So, can anyone point me to any resources for this effort? I'm looking for outlines for existing AI algorithms that are known to work reasonably well without massive coding. Or even the source code to an AI which I can pare down for my students (Like Mark Mammel's AI). Or any other pointers.

tarcellius: In a general sense, you could try to reference the AI of a chess program. The best, easiest one I've seen is Tom's Simple Chess Program that you can find at this website:http://www.tckerrigan.com/Chess/TSCP

It follows the general need for board game AI:1.) find legal moves (harder in pente than chess since more legal moves available for the most part) and potentially prune out terrible ones2.) find a way to assign a score to a positionHope that helps!